Archive for July, 2011

My heart is filled with grief. No person should ever have to write what I am about to put to paper, but only a coward shies away from the hard times in life that ultimately define us all. As I write this, I am perched upon the edge of our Tempurpedic love-nest, studying every detail of your delicate beauty and fighting back my persistent tears. For you see, this is the end. While we both knew this day was inevitable, that knowledge has done nothing to lessen the pain in my soul. So while our love has soared to new heights over the last few months, it officially crashed to Earth at 10:14 AM Pacific time when a Player’s Union rep announced that we would have professional football, thereby making autumn complete and ripping your husband from your love’s embrace.

You have made me a better man since my life was nearly destroyed in late March. Make no mistake, I was swept up by our daily existential discussions on man’s place in the universe, our exploration into cooking as an erotic outlet, and our nude, tantric yoga in the backyard. And while our souls connected and my mind became one with yours, some part of my subconscious was still craving the fulfillment that one can only get when your Z receiver runs a flawless thirty yard out pattern after a tight end, mostly know for his pass-catching ability, perfectly seals off a running lane. These plays can define a season.

I know this isn’t easy for you to hear. Try to think of it this way: you’re not losing your husband, you’re also losing the use of the TV on Sundays. Unfortunately, this also means that I will be unavailable for our Cartography class at the community center.

I believe it was Voltaire who said “Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them.” Honestly, I can only say that I “believe” it was Voltaire since I can already feel my new-found knowledge leaving me, only to be replaced by NFC West statistics and potential draft scenarios for my Yahoo! fantasy football league.

Do not think that the summer has been a complete waste. When the skies turn gray and the wild card scenarios take shape, think back to our outings to Tilles Park where we listened to classical music while enjoying duck sausage and exotic cheeses, many of which I would like to experiment with this season in finally making what I consider “The Perfect Nachos”.

By the time you awake, the change will be complete. I can feel it growing faster inside me now. When you come downstairs, I will no longer be wearing the silk pajamas you bought me on our trip to Milan. Instead, they have been replaced with a “Property of the Green Bay Packers” t-shirt and boxer shorts with a dangerously frayed crotch.

Wrap some tiny chains made of weak metal around your wrists, then violently break free while you shriek at your boss “No, YOU’RE laid off!”

Measure the length and weight of your bowel movements.

Treat your job at Arby’s as a form of speed dating.

Bury a small acorn in a large, abandoned field. Thirty years later, visit the field and marvel at the magnificent oak tree you had a hand in creating, then introduce it to your hot stripper wife, Cherry Tits.

Try to top the previous day’s bowel movement.

Buy a BMW. Get real jerky about it.

Rally your small town to finally get Baby Cody out of that well instead of just throwing down food and water while you recap this season of Mad Men via megaphone.

Work on your calf muscles to the point of obsession.

Climb to the top of Mt. Rainier and as you marvel at the power of your will and determination to conquer nature, finally whip up the courage to chop off that sixth finger with your camp axe.

Do you like baseball the way it is? Probably. Its popularity has steadily increased since the strike of 1994, but that hasn’t stopped Bud Selig, the MLB commissioner, from toying around with different ideas like interleague play and the wild card addition to the playoffs. Due to the success of these ideas and many others, consideration has been given to realignment of the two leagues and expansion of the playoffs. As a longtime fan, I’m skeptical, but ultimately, I think baseball could be made better with a few tweaks.

The current proposal sent down from the MLB offices would eliminate the divisions(East, West, and Central), leaving only the two leagues(American and National) as distinct entities. The top five teams at the end of the season would advance to the playoffs. Many would claim that this takes away the celebration and pride that comes with being a division champion, but I think there’s a way to implement the new system without taking away the pageantry that is owed to a playoff team. In each league, every playoff team would be seeded one through five, therefore at the beginning of the next season, the playoff honorees would unveil a giant numeral that represents the previous year’s playoff seed. Imagine the pageantry of the third seeded Seattle Mariners hoisting a forty foot, neon green number three in left field as the fans are chanting “Three! Three! Three!”. For years, fathers would bring their sons and daughters to the games and would proudly provide the answer to their child’s queston, “Dad, what’s that giant three out there?” and he will regale them with memories of the baseball warriors from the Pacific Northwest who took on the world in the month of October, only to fall short in the Divisional Series due to lack of depth in the bullpen. You can’t write poetry that good.

Does this mean that I want this realignment to happen? Hardly. I’m a big fan of the current structure, and while it has its flaws, it has worked pretty well. If anything, I propose that we take the benefits we have discovered with the current system and expand upon them. Don’t get me wrong. I have a proposal for MLB realignment, but I doubt that most “traditionalists” would be ready for it.

One thing that has worked very well in the current format is the unbalanced schedule. Divisional opponents play each other more than those teams outside their division, and with this familiarity comes contempt. Rivalries have formed between teams where none had been present prior to 1995. Bad blood between St. Louis and Cincinnati, Boston and Tampa Bay and Colorado and Arizona, have added spice and raised the stakes of mid-season games. I have several changes that would further breed contempt in an unprecedented manor and elevate baseball to being just shy of a bloodsport.

1) Take the existing thirty teams and split them into fifteen leagues comprised of just two teams. These teams would play each other 162 times.

2) The two teams in a division would share a five bedroom, two bath townhouse with no internet, television, or outside communication. The jacuzzi would be first come, first serve, but would always seem to smell.

3) Every Friday night, each team would be forced to participate in an inter-divisional wife swap, which would last for three days and end in the wife selecting the better lover.

4) Whenever a player reaches first base, he must tell a “Your Mama” joke to the first baseman.

5) Every first baseman must be sensitive to “Your Mama” jokes.

6) At the beginning of each game, a coin flip will determine which team will be humming “Firework” by Katy Perry all night. Try getting that out of your head.

Now I know what you’re thinking. If there are fifteen division winners, that would mean fifteen teams make the playoffs, thereby extending an already lengthy process into early winter. In order to allow such a large number of teams into the postseason, a unique playoff system would have to be implemented. The first round of the playoffs would have the least popular division winners(as chosen by the FOX network) playing a seven game series in two days and repeating this process until only four teams remain. The most popular teams(again, as chosen by Fox) would not participate in the first round and would go straight to their league championship game. Joe Buck and Bob Costas would call every game of the playoffs and would be required to use the phrase “Most historic game, ever!” at least three times a night. The league championship series would last the usual seven games, while the World Series would be nineteen games. All nineteen games would be played even if a team had already won ten. Each game would have a four day break between them so as to let the pitching aces of both teams pitch every game. Imagine the ratings. Consequently, the Simpsons Halloween Special would air in early February.

This may sound like some radical changes to our American pasttime, but when the game first started in 1971, players still believed that small men lived inside their bats which granted their homerun wishes. I’m pretty confident my changes will someday be commonplace, but we should do it now and enjoy the entertainment before the robots overrun the game.

We probably shouldn’t exist. The odds were highly stacked against all the events that led to our universe forming, our galaxy coalescing, and our little, blue planet perching in the right spot for you and me to thrive. We are all miracles.

At the moment of the Big Bang, things were very touch and go as to whether or not our universe would survive. For example, if there had been too much matter present, then there would have been too much gravity and the whole thing would have imploded. If there hadn’t been enough, there wouldn’t be the proper amount of matter needed for the galaxies to cluster and form stars, nebulas, and habitable planets. You know what else is a miracle? That I can’t go to Kroger without some fat, a-hole taking up the entire cereal aisle with his cart full of junk food and wide behind, that is barely contained in his Tennesse Titans sweat pants. All I want is some freakin’ Fruit Loops and this pant-buster is giving me the stink eye as I try to get past his hairy, sweaty, mass of a gut and his early-onset diabetes. This is a society full of OTHER PEOPLE, you stupid, freaking miracle!

As mentioned, the galaxies formed from all this new matter clumping together, but just as the Big Bang needed very specific conditions to succeed, this clumping could have easily gone wrong as well. If there had been too much clumping, then the resulting, excessive gravity would have caused the formation of massive black holes, which life finds intolerable. You know what else is intolerable? If I hold a door for some young lady dressed all in pink and her tiny Chihuahua dog (isn’t this fad over?), and she can’t take the time to remove her earbuds and say “Thank you” like a human being. Hey young lady, I realize that it’s difficult to tear yourself away from the newest collaboration between Pit Bull and M.C. Cum on Your Back, as they remix a good song from the ‘90s, like Del Amitri’s “Roll to Me”, into some mishmash of heavy basslines and talking about their enthusiasm for the chance to impregnate some young women, but I am showing you a basic courtesy. You won’t even acknowledge the electron exchange that converts Adenosine Triphosphate to Adenosine Diphosphate, thereby providing my muscles the energy needed to open the door to Old Navy and allowing your fake tanned legs to walk by as though this is my job? SERIOUSLY? You conceited improbability that reminds me just how beautiful the universe is!

Want to know what else is beautiful? The fact that we occupy a very special place in the cosmos. The planet Earth sits at a perfect distance from our sun, which in turn delivers the right amount of energy that allows us to maintain a delicate ecosystem. Our big yellow friend creates energy by fusing two hydrogen atoms together to form one helium atom, a process called fusion, and converts 0.007 percent of that mass to energy. If it uses 0.006 percent, then we have an abundance of hydrogen and not enough of the other elements. If the fusion process converts 0.008 percent of that mass to energy, then the universe is depleted of hydrogen. If we don’t have hydrogen, then we don’t have water. If we don’t have water, then we don’t have Landshark Beer and then these frat boy jackasses partying outside my window at 2AM won’t have anything to fuel their “dudeness” or help along the questionable decisions of their lady friends that result in having sex in a friend’s less-than-clean jacuzzi(again, water dependent), since they think an underwater orgasm is a viable form of birth control. Shut up or I’m calling the cops, you magnificent collection of subatomic energies that occupy a nearly impossible-to-duplicate range of conditions suitable for your existence!!!! I love you!!!